Early modern writers credited music, whether instrumental or vocal, with considerable power. In one of the first English works on psychology, the influential 1600 treatise The Passions of the minde in generall, Thomas Wright writes:

For Wright, music is one of the chief instruments by which a person can condition her or his own affections, and a powerful tool with which to move, seduce, manipulate and control the affections of others. Its effects are as various as its modes are diverse, and in Wright’s formulation music emerges instantly as an instrument of social and political control, a means by which to govern populations, mobilise soldiers, confirm social institutions and bonds, and safeguard economic production and prosperity. Moreover, unlike its cognate arts, rhetoric and poetry, music cannot be easily resisted, even by an audience fortified against it; nothing need be understood, nor can its powers be contested, for, as the ancient medical writers and natural philosophers had argued, it acts directly through the ear on the pulse, the humours and vital organs such as the heart.

This irresistible, flexible and fundamentally political power of music made it an indispensable component of early modern court experience, so much a standard feature of all forms of courtly activity that an ability to make and to judge music quickly became, for sixteenth-century courtiers brought up in the wake of Castiglione and his humanist imitators, an essential goal of their childhood study and training. The role of musical performance in constituting, negotiating and contesting political power in the Elizabethan court is the focus of Katherine Butler’s admirably thorough new study, Music in Elizabethan Court Politics. Butler takes the history of music at Elizabeth’s court far beyond formal masques and diplomatic entertainments to consider the ideological force of its representation and association with the Queen and court (e.g. in Hilliard miniatures); its intimate use as a mark of Elizabeth’s favour and the currency of her private, often performatively amorous transactions with suitors, ambassadors, favourites and other courtiers; and its inclusion in religious, theatrical and martial performances both by Elizabeth’s musicians at court and by the gentry, aristocracy and civic suitors who sought to curry the queen’s favour on her progresses. Butler sees music not merely as a tool of the early modern state, used to create and police conformity in religious practice, or deployed to mark out gradations in favour, access and power, but also as the medium through which the disgruntled, the disappointed, the disenfranchised and the downright disreputable were permitted to approach the queen and give voice to their complaints and petitions. One of the major strengths of this book is its courageous attentiveness to this polyphony: for Butler, court music could mean many things, and was used in diverse and inconsistent ways by a wide range of professionals, amateurs, gentlemen, ladies, actors, townsmen, diplomats, aristocrats, and even the queen herself; Music in Elizabethan Court Politics steers laudably clear of a synthesising reduction of the complexity of its topic, instead accumulating examples of the varied ways in which figures inside and outside court turned to musical performance as a means to build, conserve, regain or lament the loss of power – sometimes, incoherently, all at the same time. As Butler remarks of musical performances in both court and civic contexts, the ‘joyful musical surface concealed more complex political tensions beneath’ (p. 191); her study allows these tensions to emerge, without seeking falsely to resolve or dispel them. Instead, we are left with a simple, powerful message, the aggregate of many disparate examples and interventions: the performance of music at the Elizabethan court, this book argues, was always political.

In addition to its clarity and restraint, this book has many other impressive virtues. While Butler sticks close to Castiglione as the undisputed humanist heavyweight champion of courtliness, her investigation of Elizabethan court music takes in an ample catalogue of documentary sources, the records in both manuscript and print of entertainments, tourneys and tilts, diplomatic missions, courtiers’ careers, royal progresses, civic entertainments and musical settings, all of which she supplements with an impressive command of the historical and literary historical research of recent decades. Students of the subject at every level will find Butler’s footnotes – given ample room and placed conveniently on the page – a rich tissue of pointers towards further reading, making this study a good gate of entry for anyone undertaking the subject from scratch. The book’s paratexts also include a handy list of ‘musical examples’ at the front of the volume, and – along with a glossary of early modern musical terminology for the non-specialist – two very valuable appendices at its end, three lists of the ‘Secular Musicians Employed in the Royal Household of Elizabeth I’ and a series of tables recording the ‘Extant Secular Songs Connected to Elizabeth and her Court’. While these tables compile data already present, though distributed, in other sources and studies, they provide a concentrated resource for buttressing Butler’s own research here, and supply the student of Elizabethan court music with a very useful tool for identifying key musicians and their songs.

As historians of music know well, one of the key frustrations of the subject is the limited and haphazard survival of musical settings from the period. Where the music has not survived, or the relationship between extant texts and settings is unclear, much must be conjectured or argued by analogy, and Butler is forced on occasion to acknowledge just how much must remain unknown about particular performances. Some of the book’s most insightful arguments, though, emerge from reflection on the paucity of the musical record; for example, Butler is surely right to focus on the ephemerality of song as one of its distinctive and attractive features as a medium for court complaint (p. 166), and she shows convincingly how generic and formal conventions made it possible for performers to adapt existing music to new texts and occasions, offering poets, patrons, and performers fascinating opportunities to manipulate historical effects in complex, politically perilous situations. So, for example, the earl of Leicester may have employed the poet George Gascoigne to write a conventional, rather old-fashioned lament for his 1575 Kenilworth entertainment, where he mourned Elizabeth’s final rejection of his suit for her hand. While the music for neither entertainment survives, it seems that the Woodstock entertainment later that summer (its texts only published in 1585) repeated some of Gascoigne’s motifs and perhaps some of the earlier entertainment’s music, now in a form that the host – Sir Edward Dyer, an ally of Leicester’s – could use to signal Leicester’s acceptance of Elizabeth’s resolve against him (pp. 161–5). The performance in each of these entertainments would have inflected, with politic delicacy, Leicester’s careful articulation of the marriage suit, and his later tactful withdrawal; however, the surviving song texts, shorn of the connected musical settings, only hint at the delicate complexity of the transactions that took place between patron monarch, client suitor and the suitor’s own clients. Sometimes, Butler shows us, the lack of surviving musical evidence is partly a testament to the savvy ingenuity, not to mention canny political decorum, of courtiers and their instrumentalists.

Naturally, though, it is in cases where the settings do survive, or where they can be supplied from other sources, that Butler is able to combine varied evidence to produce insightful new readings of Elizabethan court performances. A characteristic example of her careful and synthesising interpretative technique comes at the end of the discussion of ‘The Politics of Intimacy’ (Ch. 2), where she deals with musical settings of hyperbolic complaints composed by Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, during his slow decline from favour and power in the late 1590s (pp. 67–75). Drawing on the work of literary critics and historians of the period such as Steven May and Catherine Bates – with whose studies of Elizabethan courtship and court poetry Butler’s study has much in common – Butler shows how Essex’s complaints carefully managed to skirt the line between sincerity and exaggeration, private anguish and public artifice. But then her analysis of musical settings by Richard Martin and Daniel Bacheler, both preserved in Robert Dowland’s 1610 Musical Banquet, demonstrates how the composers sought to downplay, rather than heighten, the poems’ hyperbolic emotional artifice. Unlike the expressive techniques employed by John Dowland in his ‘declamatory lute songs’, both Bacheler and Martin turned to dance forms – a galliard and an almand, respectively – which made the songs quick to compose and cheap, and opted for regular rhythms and a style conspicuously lacking in word painting and harmonic dissonance. The resulting performances must have made a complex impression on their hearers: both lavishing the queen with incendiary affect, and disarming it with staid conventionality, both playing at hyperbolic artifice, and presenting that artifice with a clarity and regularity that lent it an almost earnest tone. Musical settings, as often in Butler’s analysis, do not solve the hermeneutic problems posed by their poetic texts, but rather deepen those texts’ tensions and paradoxes.

Butler ultimately takes two firm positions on the use of music at Elizabeth’s court: first, that it was a flexible mode, connected to other artistic modes such as poetry, rhetoric, painting and dance, and as a potent mode among others it worked alone or in combination to mediate and express power relations in particular performances; and, second, that the idea of music – a unifying, constructive, mathematical form – emerged in and lingered after performance, reminding audiences including the queen of the structured political order in which all participants lived and transacted with one another. These claims will not seem revolutionary to anyone who has worked on the place and function of music within Elizabethan court entertainments and other activities, but Butler’s study shines not in its novel conclusions but in its richly documented and thoroughly methodical presentation. It is a storehouse of examples. In places the discussion can become so thorough that it doubles back on itself, and Butler sometimes finds herself repeating material so explicitly that she is forced to recall her own earlier discussions and cross-reference them. At other moments, too, the book’s paragraphs seem to pick up and examine historical detail for no other purpose than supplying as full as possible a picture of a given scene, performance, or representation; for readers not susceptible to the intrinsic pleasures of historical detail, this sort of exposition might prove frustrating. But quite apart from the book’s overarching conclusions, the pleasure and value of much of the study lies in the local observations, the finely attentive patience with which individual examples are treated and through which they spring to life.

Having said that, there are times when Butler’s discussion might have benefitted from slightly more creative or reflective thinking. For example, the conditions of open-air performance of consort music at public jousts or entertainments, as in civic pageants too, necessarily disadvantaged and even excluded some auditors; access to the queen’s person, as an expression of favour and privilege, thus also meant access to the performance of the queen’s music. This is an argument familiar from the study of the performance of the Jacobean masque, which regularly exploited proximity to the king to discriminate between grades of spectator, not by means of faint music but by the use of perspectival scene-painting. Sometimes, then, the performance of music at Elizabethan court and progress entertainments worked to stratify and organise its auditors, creating potentially controversial social orderings. In a similar vein – returning for a moment to Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the minde – the same music would perforce affect different auditors differently, and their judging power, or the kind or degree of pleasure they took in the music, would also serve to discriminate between them. As Wright argues:

It would have been interesting to see Butler taking a slightly more philosophical approach – as contemporaries surely did – to the operation of music, in its varied social settings, on its auditors. At least some of the time, performances of music and other shows, as in the Danish court of Hamlet, offered opportunities for people-watching, for riveting one’s eyes to another’s face, to censure of their seeming. If Elizabeth by the range and quality of her musical entertainments demonstrated her nobility, accomplishment and magnificence, she also put her ambassadors, courtiers, gentlewomen, her public auditors and her suitors to their own tests.

One of the observations about early modern attitudes to music with which Butler’s study both opens and closes is that it was regularly associated, by its anti-court detractors, with luxurious and unchaste living. George Puttenham, in the Arte of English Poesie of 1589, goes much further than Butler in a rehearsal of the origins and performance of epithalamial or marriage music. ‘[T]he tunes of the songs’, he writes, ‘were very loude and shrill, to the intent there might no noise be hard out of the bed chamber by the skreeking & outcry of the young damosell feeling the first forces of her stiffe & rigorous young man, she being as all virgins tender & weake, & vnexpert in those maner of affaires’ (p. 41). Music was played to cover the exertion, distress and pleasure experienced by grooms and brides on their first going to bed. In Puttenham’s explicit account, it becomes a screen for painful, even aggressive sexual assault; moreover, he writes that epithalamial music was afterward – at about midnight – renewed, in order ‘to refresh the faint and weried bodies and spirits, and to animate new appetites with cherefull wordes, encoraging them to the recontinuance of the same entertainments’ (p. 42). Puttenham’s shocking and difficult presentation of the role music might play in brutal social normalisation and sexual subordination – a social function echoed in early modern plays such as Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew or Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling – suggests the complex ethical force of the galliards, the almands, the madrigals and the lute performances heard at court. Butler notices these associations at various points in her discussion – particularly at the end, in briefly considering how later historians praised Elizabeth for retaining her virtue in the midst of such debauched noise – but perhaps doesn’t explore the lascivious and coercive implications of certain kinds of music-making in enough detail. Elizabeth’s court was not, by any means, the Restoration court, or even that of her father, who was known and often praised for his appetites. But in identifying her court with musical performance – in authorising musical performance as at least one of the modes, and perhaps a very privileged mode, in which political appeals, negotiations, complaints and other operations could be performed – Elizabeth cultivated power at the centre of a distinctive politics. This was a politics of the body: the dancing legs, the trembling heart, the incited nerves, the allured flesh. And yet it was also, paradoxically, a politics of disembodiment – and increasingly so, as the decades wore on – for the varied performances never issued in seduction, the courting songs never concluded in spousals, the lyric complaints rarely if ever culminated in redress, and the hymns of praise – written and performed at great expense – served (as the earl of Hertford found at Elvetham in 1591) generally only to bankrupt the praiser. This embodied disembodiment, what Sir Philip Sidney called an ‘absent presence’ and Edmund Spenser (punningly) the ‘perfect hole’ of Elizabeth’s chaste self-husbanding, offers a rich conceptual and ideological context for assessing the power and meaning of intimate, affective, coercive musical performance in Elizabeth’s court – a complex project to which Katherine Butler’s introductory study can only gesture.

Music in Elizabethan Court Politics may shy away from more elaborate and complex arguments about the operations and significance of music in the political exchanges of Elizabeth’s court, but it does offer a richly documented introduction to the subject – one that identifies and describes the full range of forms and contexts with which any student or scholar will need to grapple, and one that effectively bridges the often difficult gap between the study of music and poetry, music history and literary critical interpretation. By situating Elizabethan musical composition and performance firmly in a richly detailed social and political history of the court, Butler demonstrates emphatically that (and why) the study of the music of this period cannot be divorced from the contexts in which it was produced, or from the companion arts with which it was flourishingly combined.